A Man Who Left Taiwan at 30, on How He Fled a Stable Life | Housing and Our Lives ⑧

Housing is the largest thing a human being ever buys, and one of the witnesses to how a life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that follow housing as a thread, to see what happened over the years.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived only through the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before us.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a faith in progress and development; a belief that society will keep giving individuals more and better room to live in; that effort earns its reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

Which is simply to say: universal values.

Put a word like "history" in front of us and it tends to disappear under grand narratives. We want to do what we can, through interviews at the smallest scale, to sort some of it out.

We begin this record with the subject people watch most closely in their own lives: housing.

When Liao Xinzhong talks about his past, the parts that involve housing are few — he would rather describe his life.

Liao Xinzhong was born in Taipei in 1977. For the first 30 years of his life he lived in Tianmu, in Shilin District, the area Taiwanese people call "the most beautiful and the wealthiest" part of Taipei.

Tianmu has another name: "the Celestial Dragon Kingdom inside the Celestial Dragon Kingdom." The term "Celestial Dragon" comes from a clan in the Japanese manga One Piece who believe their blood is noble; it later became a nickname for Taipei, a way of describing the city's political and business elite, people with no idea how ordinary people live. And the people of Tianmu are the extreme case of that group.

Liao Xinzhong was born into exactly such a family: upper-middle-class, textbook. His father was a successful pharmaceutical distributor, his mother a homemaker, and he had a younger sister. They lived in a ten-story mixed residential-commercial building in Tianmu, in a 200-square-meter apartment furnished with the standard equipment of a middle-class household: a piano, a flute, and a house full of encyclopedias.

His parents mapped out his life without asking him: study hard, get into a famous middle school, go to National Taiwan University, then become a civil servant or study abroad. But Liao Xinzhong kept going the other way. His grades were bad. He repeated a year more than once. Rebellious, defiant.

In 2007, the year he turned 30, Liao Xinzhong left Taipei for Shanghai. In his own words: "You can only flee."

What he fled was stability, and a life in which there was only one correct way to live.

Liao Xinzhong was one of the young Taiwanese who poured into Shanghai around the year 2000. Taiwan's politics were in turmoil then, while the mainland economy — Shanghai's especially — was growing fast. So in 2000 a "Shanghai fever" swept Taiwan, and the bookshops filled up with titles teaching people how to buy property and start businesses there. Taiwanese media reported at the time that on flights from Taiwan via Hong Kong to Shanghai, nearly every passenger was holding a copy of My Shanghai Experience.

These young Taiwanese saw opportunity on the mainland — more precisely, they saw "Robin Li, Jack Ma, Pony Ma, that crowd of young men who had enormous fortunes on the mainland by their thirties and forties," Liao Xinzhong said. They hoped to repeat that history for themselves, because they had already missed Taiwan's own economic takeoff.

But the pressure in Shanghai turned out to be greater than these young people had imagined.

Over his ten years in Shanghai, Liao Xinzhong's rent rose from 1,300 yuan to 16,000 yuan.

Young Taiwanese in Shanghai no longer have the enclave they once huddled in for warmth. In the early 1990s, Taiwanese people gathered in Shanghai's Gubei New Area, the first large, high-standard international residential district the city built, in 1986 — buildings Liao Xinzhong describes as "dripping with nouveau-riche taste." That enclave has since declined, and young Taiwanese are scattered across every corner of Shanghai, because the reality is that "the Taiwanese who came to Shanghai early on were all bosses. Now they're all here looking for jobs," Liao Xinzhong said.

Almost as soon as he arrived, the financial crisis hit and a department store laid him off. He had to find another way to live: making chocolate at home and selling it online.

But that storm also brought Liao Xinzhong "a 180-degree change in life." Laid off, he suddenly had long stretches of free time to try writing, and blundered into becoming a bestselling author. He now lives off royalties from four books and the occasional writing fee, working as a freelancer in Shanghai, leading something like the small, certain happiness of Taipei: even though Taiwanese people can now buy property on the same terms as Shanghai residents, he doesn't buy — he'd rather stay unburdened; he turns down offers from film and television companies, because too many commitments would tie his hands...

He has never had a grand plan, except for one thing he mentioned in both of our interviews with him: "I hope that what I write can be used by other people, twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, to study what actually happened in this era."

Liao Xinzhong likes to call himself "the middle-aged man Writer Liao" in his pieces, but he carries none of the labels usually pinned on middle-aged men. His peers are all married, settled, established; only he still lives what he calls a life of "spiritual freedom." His everyday uniform never changes: shorts, a polo shirt, sneakers, and a pair of dark red glasses.

Liao Xinzhong's friends know that when he is doing one of two things — writing, or playing piano — he is entirely inside his own world, and nobody can wake him out of it. He still spends two hours a day at the piano.

Liao Xinzhong isn't sure whether he will settle in Shanghai for good. All he knows is that if he is ever shaken awake, he will choose to flee again.

Below is Liao Xinzhong's account, in his own words — one way of getting to know him:

"A strange sense of superiority"

In Taipei I lived in a place called Tianmu, in a 200-square-meter apartment. I lived in Tianmu until I was thirty. My father used to be a pharmaceutical distributor — the people distributing drugs were all rich — and my mother was an ordinary homemaker. I have a younger sister. Everything was planned well, everything looked lovely, but it felt a little unreal. The people who lived there all had... a strange sense of superiority that came from who knows where. Back then someone proposed running a subway line out to Tianmu, and people there said, "No, no, no, the subway brings too many people, we don't need it, we don't need it, just let the line stop short of here. We all have cars anyway. Better if the people from outside don't come at all."

Everyone who lived there was middle-class or above — doctors, lawyers, local landowners, the fairly respected professions. At the elementary school next to my house, I remember, nearly every kid in the class came from a comfortable family. My mother was set on dumping me into one of those expensive so-called aristocratic elementary schools. Too bad she didn't quite make the cut. Ha.

Housing there cost 60% more than the rest of Taipei. We bought ours forty years ago. It was one of those old mixed residential-commercial buildings, ten stories, with bookstores and shops on the first two floors. Three bedrooms: one for my parents, one for me, one for my sister. My books kept piling up. I liked picture books, the thick hardcover illustrated encyclopedias.

My sister took up the flute and practiced every day; I played piano. Generally, once a middle-class family has spare money, they send the kids to learn an instrument — piano is standard, maybe violin or flute too, anything. I studied piano, mental arithmetic, drawing, English; I even took children's ballet. Not one of them came to anything. In hindsight it was all money down the drain. Ha.

All parents are like this, you know — the moment they have spare money they send the kids off to learn something. Look at Shanghai now: outside the Yamaha music classes, every afternoon when school lets out, there's a whole row of luxury cars parked at the door. City parents, middle-class parents, they're all the same.

The same anxiety, the same expectations for their children.

I hated all that extra tutoring, and I never liked studying anyway. I felt small — bad grades, not good-looking — so I wanted to do something rebellious just to prove I existed, which is how I ended up straying further and further down this crooked path. My parents still hope I'll come to my senses, take the civil service exam, do it for ten years and collect a pension.

"Flight"

In Taiwan I never wanted for food or clothing. My parents would arrange a job for me — maybe a wife too — but I didn't like it. It was boring. Always so stable.

I didn't leave Taiwan until I was 30. You can only flee.

Around 30 I realized it was all a waste, that my whole life had already been arranged. Because my parents had a little social standing, whatever job I wanted, they knew somebody who could arrange it. Just like that. Everything came too easily; basically whatever I wanted, there was no real trouble getting it.

On the mainland, there is so much I can't get.

Shanghai especially — it's the most economically developed place in China, and everyone in this city is fighting just to stay in it. Taipei, of course, isn't under anything like that pressure now. If I were in Taiwan I'd be very comfortable right now. Taiwan today isn't short of money — it's extremely rich — the wealth just isn't moving. It's still in the hands of people in their fifties and sixties. So when that generation, our parents' generation, passes away, the wealth will flow down to ours, and people in their thirties and forties will finally have money.

Taiwan is now a society with a fixed class structure. So is the US. But a society with a fixed class structure is a stable society — very healthy, very stable, with welfare, a society where everything is interesting.

I used to have a girlfriend from Shanghai. I was more impulsive when I was young, and in a fit of temper I moved to Shanghai. Everyone else came for a dream; I was the only one who came for a woman. I rented a place near Yuping South Road, right outside the Loushanguan Road metro station. I only stayed in that first apartment for six months — 30 square meters, 1,300 yuan at the end of 2007. I walked past not long ago and checked: 3,100 now. Terrifying.

Then came the 2008 snowstorm, freezing cold, and after that the 2008 financial crisis. Six months later I slunk back to Taiwan with my tail between my legs. I'd been laid off.

Coming to Shanghai changed my life 180 degrees. I had never once thought I'd write a book. The first time I ever put pen to paper was in Shanghai, because I'd been laid off, had a huge amount of time and nothing to do with it, so I started writing. At first writing a book was purely practical — publishing could make money. I wrote some of it in 2008, then a year went by, and the book didn't come out until the end of 2009. Four months later I came back to Shanghai; by June, just after the Wenchuan earthquake, I'd spent a month fooling around and had already burned through my money again.

I just didn't want to keep living at home; I wanted to get out. I felt you earned so little in Taiwan, the wages were too low. My monthly income in Taiwan then was 6,000 yuan. At the end of 2008 I found a job in Shanghai paying just over 10,000 after tax, doing marketing for a home-furnishings shop inside a department store. I'd been there four months when the publisher handed me another payment, and I didn't want to work anymore. Ugh, so shameless of me.

I have been genuinely poor. Around 2013. My first book came out in 2009 and the second didn't come out until 2014 — a long gap. The first book sold decently, but I had no plan and spent it all. By 2013 I thought, whoa, this is bad, I'm nearly out of money, and I hadn't bought a place either. I'd just been eating into my savings.

Around then I traveled all over China, often to the Northeast. I particularly liked the desolate, decaying feeling of the small and mid-sized cities up there, the sense of cities that will be gone within thirty years. That's when I thought: this is bad, what else can I do, I'm already 35, and damn it, whatever happens I can't ask my parents for money. I had to come up with something. Being truly broke really does draw out your potential — every way there might be to make money, you'll think of it.

Before Shanghai I'd worked at a food company in Taiwan making chocolate, so I tried making and selling chocolate again here — making it at home, selling it on Taobao. It sold pretty well, 14,000 to 15,000 yuan a month, so I had money to spend again and got through that stretch.

Then, unexpectedly, my second book finally got published in 2014. It had actually been written in 2010 and 2011. In 2014 and 2015 I put out three more books in a row, and I got through it — a near thing. If it had been held another year or two, that would have been the end of me, wouldn't it?

From here on I want to influence more people. Once you have this much public recognition and influence, you should do the things within your power that can move others toward something positive. I hope my books, the words I've written, can be used by other people, twenty years from now, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, to study what actually happened in this era.

Before that I need a bit more influence, so that people remember you.

Thinking about it now — if I'd stayed in Taiwan the whole time, I'd have been working over a decade by now, not high enough to matter and not low enough to quit, right about the age when a marriage starts running into trouble.

"Ten years of change"

My first thirty years in Taiwan changed me less than these ten years on the mainland.

I've moved through four apartments in Shanghai. Young Taiwanese friends who'd just arrived used to ask me how to find a rental agency you can trust. I told them: never believe the photos online, and generally speaking, an agency with a few old men and women inside jiggling their legs over a mahjong game, sunflower-seed shells all over the floor, thoroughly unmotivated and cheerfully resigned to a future-free life — that kind of place is more reliable than one where everyone is working the phones like mad, singing I Want to Fly Higher in chorus every morning, everyone in suits, brimming with positive energy.

At first a friend and I rented a place together in a compound nearby, three bedrooms and two living rooms. I started in the smallest room. Later my friend moved out, I took over the whole lease, and sublet the other rooms to some foreigners. That's when the rent started climbing. Over these ten years my rent went from 1,300 to 10,000 yuan. I picked up basic renovation skills along the way — wiring, cement work...

From 2009 to 2014, those five years, I lived in that place, Sanhe Garden, on Yanping Road. The unit I first moved into was 120 square meters. I didn't want to move — there was a piano in the unit across the hall that I loved — so I rented that one too. Two hundred square meters.

I often took the foreigners out around the city, so I know my way through some of Shanghai's stranger lanes. A lot of what I write about now comes from what I picked up then.

Between 2009 and 2013 an enormous number of old lane neighborhoods were being demolished, and I'd often take them around the sites to pick up old furniture. Back then the area across from Taiping Lake was coming down, and the stretch at Nanjing West Road and the corner of Maoming North Road; Dongtai Road was still there. There was a lot to salvage — wherever something was being torn down, we went.

My second apartment faced Jing'an Temple. Every day I wrote facing the night view of Jing'an Temple, living what felt like an endlessly glittering life, which really pushed me to work and make money. The building itself wasn't much, fairly old, but the night view was so beautiful, so wide open, that just sitting there looking at it made me want to write.

That year, 2015, my output was especially high — a thousand characters a day — because of that night view. I also made a lot of chocolate over there. But I couldn't stand the dim lighting in the stairwell; it was too dark. Still, that compound had a lot of young Russian models, the genuinely nine-heads-tall, ten-heads-tall kind, obviously under 20. Some agency must have been sending them to work in China; four or five of them shared a single room.

Later I moved to the building next door, where the old cadres lived — the old work-unit housing compound. It was a strange place: a very old, dated high-rise with ten households per floor, and yet the most expensive compound in the whole area, because its school district was one of the best elementary schools in Shanghai, the one attached to the No. 1 Normal School.

Right next door was Jing'an Temple, the center of Shanghai, so the compound was made up of old people and children, no young people, which is why all kinds of strange domestic incidents happened there.

I wrote a great deal about the things that happened in that compound — the time I was accidentally dragged into someone else's family dispute, a funeral next door, all kinds of odd neighborhood gossip. One night at midnight I went out to buy a fried chicken cutlet, and when I came back the elevator door opened on a middle-aged woman shouting at me, "Why won't 110 go through?" I said, "Try dialing again!" It was only because I'm too curious — that whole warm-blooded spirit of neighbors looking out for one another welled up in me — that I added, "What happened?" The next thing I knew the old woman collapsed to the floor, wailing, "Save me! My daughter-in-law hit me!" — still dialing 110 for the police between sobs.

Then the door flew open, the lights inside blazed on, and a woman rushed out, getting the first word in: "You brought someone back here again!" Clearly the daughter-in-law. The old woman cried louder: "They're going to throw all my things out, they don't want me anymore!" Her son cut in: "You bring home so much trash it stinks and you still won't throw it out." The old woman cried harder still: "You're actually taking that woman's side, I raised you for nothing, if I'd known I'd never have let Beibei" — her granddaughter — "register her household here." Because the compound is famous for its school district, a lot of old people register their grandchildren there from birth, so there are many three-generation households.

The daughter-in-law started up again. It turned out the old woman, retired with nothing to do, would go through the trash outside at night and bring things home to sell. At first, embarrassed at being seen, she'd blamed it on her son and daughter-in-law; over time it escalated, and she took to telling anyone who'd listen that her son and daughter-in-law refused to support her, how pitiful she was. So the son was forever having to explain to people outside that his mother had everything she needed — she just loved picking through trash and he couldn't stop her.

Soon an old man arrived. He turned out to be the compound's famous mediator, head of the retirees' writing group, retired old cadre Teacher Zhong. I watched Teacher Zhong shuffle over in his striped pajamas, and the moment I saw him I thought: ah, my savior. He looked up, saw me, and his eyes lit up, kindly: "Writer Liao, what are you doing here?"

Me: "Heh heh."

With that he swept his hand grandly and announced to the whole family: "Writer Liao is a reasonable man. I'm comfortable leaving this to him." Then he turned and walked off.

Me: "……"

Teacher Zhong having issued his ruling, the old woman edged toward me as if trying to hide behind me. Her daughter-in-law, who had been ready to settle into a cold war, suddenly exploded: "Bringing someone back is bad enough, but a writer! Aren't you afraid he'll put our family's business in a novel? Family shame shouldn't be aired in public, you've lived this long, don't you get it, don't you, don't you!" Then she turned and warned me: "If you dare write it or tell anyone, I'll sue you for defamation." I posted it on Weibo anyway.

I thought to myself: I'm just a poor scribbler who lives off writing, up past midnight, wanting to reward himself with a cheap chicken cutlet, and somehow I've been dragged into your family feud. Is this an easy life? The more I thought about it the more forlorn I felt. I couldn't help clenching my hand, and the oil from the cutlet started seeping out. I thought, if I hold this bag too long it'll go soggy and taste bad. Watching the standoff, not knowing what to do, at that tense and awkward moment, I took a bite of the chicken.

Gluttony really is one of the seven deadly sins. From the moment I bit into that cutlet the whole thing went downhill fast. The old woman suddenly started crying again, shouting: "I'm being bullied this badly and you still have the appetite for fried chicken? Have you no conscience, no conscience at all?!"

Me: "….."

The shouting outside woke the little kid, and once the child started crying it unexpectedly pulled the whole family back together. The daughter-in-law scolded the old woman: "It was fine before you brought someone in and made it into a thing — look, you've woken Beibei," and then, "Mom, from now on whatever happens at home, we handle it ourselves. No need for outsiders to know."

The son kept repeating: "See, it was fine — one person comes in and Beibei's awake again, sleep matters so much for a child!"

The daughter-in-law turned on me again: "Why are you stirring up trouble for nothing? What business of yours is our family?"

Me: "…."

The old woman scolded me too: "Young people shouldn't meddle so much in other people's affairs, mind your own — and you're not exactly young, still not married, running around at midnight, you have no family of your own, what do you know? Our family's business is not yours to comment on."

Me: "…."

I just wanted to eat my chicken in peace.

I've noticed everyone loves reading about these neighborhood squabbles. Every time I put one of these trivial dramas online, people love it. Ah, these vulgar people.

Right now I live on Jiaozhou Road — one year and nine months. I want to move in October; I'm thinking of finding a unit higher up in the same building. From my window now I can only see Plaza 66, with a stretch of old lanes below. I figure if I get up to the twentieth floor or so, I should be able to see Lujiazui. I've also been thinking of running a flea market, but renting a stall outside in Shanghai is expensive, so I'm thinking of the open-house version instead: point at whatever you want in my apartment, and whatever you point at, I'll sell you.

I used to have a tourist's stereotypes about China, but living here I can step outside Taiwan and look back at Taiwan. In a few years I might go abroad again and look at China from outside. It's like how people used to say Shanghainese are all so hard-nosed and calculating — that's one side of it; the city has its own character, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a commercial city, so people draw clear boundaries. I actually prefer dealing with Shanghainese, because as long as the boundary between people is clear, getting along is more pleasant. In the north people call each other brother, and sometimes that crosses a line — I might feel I've been shortchanged while you don't feel you're taking advantage of me at all — and then it isn't pleasant anymore.

That's how commercial cities work — everything runs on commercial contracts. Shanghainese might argue to the death too, but they're always arguing their own logic: you have your reasons, I have mine. Relatively speaking, more civilized.

I don't think relations between the mainland and Taiwan are as bad as people say. Once 2020 comes and the Kuomintang takes power, their line will change immediately. However bad it gets, it won't be as bad as it was decades ago. Taiwan will be reunified sooner or later anyway. The earliest Taiwanese to come to the mainland arrived in the nineties; there was another big wave of young Taiwanese coming to Shanghai in 2015. So how can relations be getting worse? Say what you like — young Taiwanese still keep coming to Shanghai.

Young people in Taiwan see plenty of opportunity on the mainland. What they see above all is — damn — Robin Li, Jack Ma, Pony Ma, that crowd who had enormous fortunes on the mainland by their thirties and forties, and it makes the mainland's opportunities look huge. What they don't see is that young people on the mainland are under enormous pressure, and that if they stayed in Taiwan they could actually live a decent, comfortable little life.

Taiwan is past that era. The people now in their sixties and seventies are the ones who enjoyed Taiwan's economic takeoff — Asus, Acer, HTC, Foxconn all got their start then.

Now, to attract young Taiwanese, the mainland is offering a lot of preferential treatment to Taiwanese compatriots. The last couple of years that has included buying property on the same terms as Shanghai residents. You have to pay in full — but if you have a proper job and pay into the housing fund, you can get a mortgage.

My first impression of the 2000 "Shanghai fever" was picking up a book about Shanghai and landing on a page about Gubei, with a photograph: shot from a low angle, a fashionably dressed woman in sunglasses strolling through the courtyard garden of a high-end residential compound. That gave me my rough idea of the area.

The Taiwanese who arrived in Shanghai in the '90s all gathered in Gubei. At the time it was a relatively new, well-developed neighborhood, all high-rises, well planned, so foreign companies, Taiwanese and Japanese naturally gathered there; the Japanese consulate is there too.

I always thought of that place as nouveau-riche territory. The buildings are steeped in the nouveau-riche taste of the '90s. Next time you take the elevated road toward Hongqiao Airport, look over that way as you pass and you'll see what I mean. All high-rises, some of them quite odd-looking. The shops there are petit-bourgeois too — every kind of imported-food store, standard middle-class flavor.

Taiwanese people live more scattered now. Gubei used to be an upscale residential district; the Taiwanese who came to Shanghai early on were fairly rich, all bosses. Now they're all here looking for jobs.

I rarely go over there, and I rarely mix with Taiwanese people in Shanghai. People come to Shanghai from all over China; there's no sticking with people from your own hometown. In a place this fiercely competitive, what's the point of huddling with the folks from back home all day? Taiwanese especially love to huddle. I find it baffling.

Only after coming to the mainland did I realize that Taiwan has its own course and the mainland has its own course, and everyone thinks from where they stand. Only by stepping outside your original position, the ground you originally stood on, can you look at things from a higher level. Only from higher up can you see what's happening on both sides.

If you stay in Taiwan you'll think, wow, Taiwan is so tragic, always being suppressed by the mainland. That's what you'll think if you never leave. But on the mainland you'll think, hell, this kind of thing happens all over the world. Taiwan isn't special.

You have to think about how to make your own place, how to work, how to avoid these problems, how to reconcile the two peoples, how to help them understand each other. If one day I go to another country — the US, say — maybe I could stand there and look at how the three of them, the two sides of the strait and the US, act on one another.

"Spiritual freedom"

These past few years I've become a full-time writer, something I couldn't have imagined before, which means I plan my own life and my own work instead of having someone plan it for me. It feels free, but freedom is relative — you have to be able to discipline yourself.

When I first went freelance I slept until ten in the morning. Every day it was reading, writing, practicing piano. Basically those few things. Honestly it was boring, and demoralizing.

These past three years have been steadier. I write for several outlets now. I write columns for some foreign media, about serious matters in Taiwan. I have an alias on Douban, though Douban is the most useless of them — there's no way to make money there, and Douban is full of broke people. You know how they say Douban's fans are like the fans of AcFun, which got shut down not long ago — Douban's fans and AcFun's fans are both the least valuable kind: people who feel very good about themselves and have no money.

On Douban I write all sorts of strange, pointless things, but every piece I put there gets over a hundred thousand reads — a hundred-thousand-plus readership is no problem there. On Douban I've built a persona: a man with no proper job, and how he lives. On my official account I mainly write about how I actually live. On Weibo I just rant every day. Each of the four has a different subject.

Reading every day is essential for me. I started writing a pile of columns in 2009, and after a year I couldn't produce anything, I'd written myself dry. After that I had to read.

I have a bit more confidence now, I think. The confidence comes from... having money. I shouldn't put it that way — how can a cultured man say a thing like that, ha. The confidence comes from relying on yourself, working at it bit by bit until you have what you want — earning your own money, being able to do what you actually like.

There have been plenty of opportunities in Shanghai and I made good use of almost none of them. People wanted me to start things with them — a culture company, a film and television company, what's now fashionably called content entrepreneurship — just to lend my name. A few years back someone wanted me to co-found a business promoting imported Taiwanese food. All sorts of odds and ends. I turned all of it down. I just felt the name wouldn't match the substance. The only opportunity I really did take hold of, it seems, is writing books. Writing books is the only thing I can do.

I think I'm already in a very fortunate position. All I need to do is concentrate on writing my own words. Taking on too much else would cost me spiritual freedom, and I think spiritual freedom matters a great deal. I'm not making a lot of money now, but I don't have to ask anyone for anything. I don't have to write what someone tells me to write because of money, and I don't have to grit my teeth and do things against my own wishes.

This state — enough money to spend, but not a lot — is good. Too much money and I'd get arrogant, and once I'm arrogant I won't even want to write.

I think in life you can do pretty much anything you want; it only depends on whether you can carry the consequences. Like when my money was running out and I'd think, this is bad, I'm finished. Someone with a proper job probably wouldn't have that problem. A life like mine is more exciting.

Measured purely in money, I'll never reach where my parents got. I feel like I'm sliding backwards — but I chose it myself.

My sister, for instance, went to the US for graduate school after college, studied music, and married a Taiwanese man over there. As first-generation immigrants they have it harder — she has three kids, and breaking into American society is harder work. It's the same in a city like Shanghai: everyone works so that they, and their children, can stay.

She teaches music at an American elementary school now, having earned a teaching certificate; her husband works at a printing company. They're both working hard so their children will be absorbed into mainstream American society. I can see them doing it.

The oldest is already in elementary school — and they do everything every Chinese parent worries about and does. Working hard to cultivate his talents, angling to get him into a better school, hoping he can go to one of those New England boarding schools for middle school.

They had three boys. I told them the fastest way is to raise one for politics, one to be a businessman or a gangster, and one to be a soldier. Give it thirty years and you can be the empress of America.

I don't envy them. Think how exhausting it must be.

"The age of the hundred-thousand hit"

Foreign outlets and some domestic magazines pay me pretty well. Foreign outlets pay about 1,000 yuan per 1,000 characters; domestic ones around 1.6 yuan a character. Among foreign outlets I've written for Businessweek, Bloomberg and the Financial Times; they carry a lot of influence, so I still write for them. Some domestic paid-reading magazines pay quite well too — Kan Tianxia sometimes goes to 2 yuan a character. Add my royalties every six months and it's honestly enough.

The rate hasn't changed in all these years. Back in 2009 they were already paying me a thousand yuan per thousand characters, which was actually high. For comparison, Mengya paid 300 per thousand characters then; Taiwanese newspapers also paid a thousand per thousand characters, in Taiwan dollars. I was submitting to newspapers back in high school, and the rate in Taiwan hasn't changed either.

So everyone has gone off to run official accounts instead. I'm especially grateful to the readers of mine. I don't have many followers, only about ten thousand, and my average readership is six or seven thousand.

Living off writing is very hard, but I'm relatively steady now — books make up a big part of my income. My monthly writing fees only just cover the rent; I'm paying 16,000 yuan a month now. Still, relatively speaking, I already have it much easier than most people, so I have nothing to complain about.

The only pressure I feel now is the fear of being overtaken. So many new people are coming in, so many young ones writing better. There's a whole crowd of strange official accounts writing inspirational fluff. Everybody says they hate that kind of writing, and everybody clearly loves reading it.

They write about how you should live — and these accounts, the big ones especially, are mostly written by people born after 1990, even after 1995. At my age I read it and think, what do you know — and people love it anyway. Everyone already knows these truths; but knowing something and living it are two different things.

I just think: if they write this crap this well at their age, once they've lived a little they'll write even better, won't they?

There will always be demand for inspirational fluff, but you have to understand why people love reading it. You can't say, what crap, badly written, and look down on it. If it's written this badly and this many people still read it, you have to think about the reason behind it, what the social cause is. Take that piece that flooded everyone's feed, "Beijing's 20 Million" — the sore point in it is clearly a kind of shabby bitterness, but you can't deny some of the facts in it; that sourness hit a nerve for Beijingers and for people who'd moved to Beijing for work alike, and it got both sides arguing. All you can say is that the piece was full of emotion, and writing full of emotion generally strikes a chord.

Take a runaway hit. You can list a dozen reasons, a hundred reasons why that particular piece got a hundred thousand reads — and write another one exactly the same way and it won't necessarily get there. So everyone running an official account is anxious now, working out how to hit a hundred thousand, whether there's a formula.

In sum: you need emotion, and you need to hit the sore spot.

This is an age that counts nothing but the hundred-thousand hit. I don't feel that anxiety, because I have enough money. I write whatever I like.

What troubles me now is that things have gone too smoothly. So smoothly that I sometimes wonder: is something going to happen later?

These past few years my peers all seem to have had a hard time of it. Family pressure, money pressure, work pressure. I have none of it. Sometimes I feel a little guilty — so smooth, so little hardship, comfortable day after day — and I wonder whether I deserve it, and think I should work harder to deserve what I've been given.

Do I envy them? No, not at all — except for the ones making truly enormous amounts of money, which anyone would envy. They put in that effort, and they lost a lot along the way. It depends what you choose.

Everyone envies me, but only I know what it's actually like. You can make any choice you want; it only depends on whether you can carry the result. Say you dropped everything right now to travel the world — you could, plenty of people do — but you'd have to weigh the possibility of not finding a job when you come back. If you can carry that, there's nothing to be afraid of.

Forty is the age under the most pressure right now, and more so on the mainland than in Taiwan. The mainland has a much bigger population and everyone is pushing upward. Whatever job you do, there's a so-called midlife crisis waiting. Terrifying.

But writing isn't a bad job. As long as you don't come down with something like Alzheimer's as you age, you can keep writing. If I make it to eighty, I can write until then. There's no real concept of retirement in this line of work.

Graphics by Lin Yuyao

All images not otherwise credited were provided by Liao Xinzhong.